Abstract:

Introduction:
Sleep medicine is an emerging speciality which medical students utilise less. A Lithuanian survey compared sleep problems among medical students with those of law and economics students. It concluded that medical students had the highest prevalence of poor sleep and poorer associated quality of life compared to other student groups. 50–60% of medical students had inadequate sleep, with a female preponderance.

Aim:
To raise awareness about the sleep insufficiency problem among medical students and its causes and effects, and to generate potential resolving strategies.

Method:
A narrative literature review was conducted between 2000 and 2024 on the scientific electronic databases using keywords to obtain the pertinent data. Inclusion criteria were English publications with full reports of articles and abstracts in other foreign languages from peer-reviewed journals. Sleep studies of other course students were excluded.

Results & Discussion:
Sleep is a physiological process for wellbeing. Sleep deprivation (SD) has been reported among medical students for a decade. However, there is a knowledge gap of its impact even among medical students. This creates detrimental effects such as burnout, medical errors, compromising patient safety and losing the medical workforce in the long-term. SD is attributed to their heavy academic load, responsibilities and tight schedules in professional activities, leading to knock on effect to their circadian cycle compromising sleep quality. Quality and duration of sleep define sleep impairment which impacts on memory, regulating emotions, motor and creative problem-solving skills, mental health issues affecting academic and clinical performance, psychological/emotional wellbeing and social consequences like car accidents.
The corrective process should include prevention, early detection and intervention strategies. Regular self-sleep screening using sleep apps with guided remedies should be generated for medical students. Socioecological sleep framework, Psychometric personality analysis can help to design prevention strategies. Include sleep health education as a mandatory part of medical curriculum. Raising awareness among medical students, educators and policy makers about this well reported but under recognised impact of insufficient sleep is vital towards efficacy. Providing an opportunity for sleep health promotion during undergraduate training can enhance long-term health and wellbeing among medical professionals, protect/save our future work force and patients while delivering high quality health care.

Conclusion:
The medical profession has high expectations and requirements to fulfil the role of a doctor, which includes managing stress, emotional resilience, thinking acutely, and making critical decisions, whilst coping with irregular shift patterns, non-social hours duty and being on emergency call necessitates optimal sleep health. From the current scientific/clinical research evidence, there is no reported improvement in the tackling of this essential wellbeing concern. Framing positive sleep health may aid with raising awareness and health promotion initiatives at management and policy making levels. Future research recommendation is to consider an international multi-centre randomised control trial combining these multiple factors towards reducing the cultural, ethnic diversity and economical bias in global medical education.

Keywords:

medical students, sleep health, causes and effect, sleep solutions.